This is the blog/travel journal for Chris & Joanne Reilly from Glasgow, Scotland. After quitting our jobs and selling our house, we plan to travel around the globe for the next year.

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Fake Tales of Bangkok City

For once both of us managed to get a little bit of a sleep on the bus. We were supposed to arrive in Bangkok at 6.30 am but despite the numerous lengthy stops the bus driver hammered us to Bangkok and we were dropped off at Khao San road at 4.30 in the morning. We had printed the address for the hotel but the print was pretty poor and wandered down the street trying to find an internet. This place reminds me of Glasgow city centre at 2am picking up a rather merry Mr Reilly, sticky smelly streets and loads of people either falling over or holding each other up!! We managed to get onto the internet and arrived early at our hotel The Bangkok City Suite at 5.30am.

After some discussions the staff let us have our room from 6.15am which was rather nice of them and we both tried to get a little sleep. We then managed to get reception to give us a room later in the day which had a wireless connection and thankfully I hadn’t unpacked that much. So it was back to reception and after what seemed a lifetime they eventually agreed to provide us with another room after 1pm. We had a quick shower and headed out as we wanted to scout out the weekend market.

We arrived at the market at lunchtime and it was rather busy, hot and sweaty walking or dodging people, stalls and trolleys laden with goods. Chris bought a tee-shirt (surprise, surprise) and I managed to get some other pressies and after a couple of hours we had had enough and decided to head back. We are about a 15 minute walk from the Sky Train and as we left the rain started to come down, well within 2 minutes we were drenched. The traffic came to a complete standstill so the only option was to walk in the heavy thunder storm, it was like having a shower with your clothes on. The water was hot, we were soaked to the skin and had such a laugh walking down the street. You would have thought that we were crazy with the looks that some people gave us although many folks just smiled and laughed at us as we danced our way back to the hotel. The staff at reception looked at us in disbelief as we soaked the reception area to collect our key for our new room.

It was the Rangers v Celtic game that night and yes that is one of the main reasons why we left the beach early to allow a certain person to watch the game on the TV. We managed to find a bar in the Sukhumvit area that was supposed to be showing the game so we jumped in a taxi as it was still raining and managed to find Hilarys Bar. Unlike a lot of the bars this place had slightly older girls playing pool with Western men and too be honest it wasn’t too sleazy. So we settled down with some great burgers and chips although unlike Glasgow the girl kept trying to take my plate away as I was still eating she was nearly forked a couple of times as I tried to stab a chip. We had a couple of jugs of beer and then another couple as we watched Rangers lose 1-0. Our bar maid was rather tipsy as one of her customers had been buying her a few drinks and she kept on topping Chris’s drink up and telling me to look after him – I think she was after him with all the looks she kept on giving him.

The following day we made it up for breakfast which was slightly better than anticipated but cold fried eggs is not something that we relish eating with a hangover, but we managed to eat some anyway. We went to the MBK shopping mall and spent some time wandering around there and then into the Siam Discovery, Siam Centre and the Paragon Shopping Mall. We had pizza for lunch/dinner as we needed some sustenance to keep us going. We managed to find a Tesco shopping centre and spent about an hour wandering around buying some things for the fridge and then some other stuff as well. It’s probably one of the best supermarkets we have been in since leaving Oz.

As it was valentine’s night we decided to treat ourselves and went to ‘Hemlock’ a restaurant we had been in several times on previous visits. The place was busy and we waited to be seated. It was a really romantic table with less than a foot between us and the next one and it took a while to order food and drink. Our food was placed on the table next to us and the guy asked us was this what we ordered so we ended up spending the rest of the meal chatting to them. We wandered up Khao San road and then headed home.

On Tuesday it was the arrival of Mr Reilly junior (Andrew, Chris’s brother, to those who know him) and after having breakfast Chris left to meet him at the airport. Chris was a bit worried when he realised that Andrew's flight refernce was HN51 and the avian bird flu was on the march again

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